life on planet earth on Character Development

At least as important as the things we wait for is the work God wants to do in us as we wait… Picture a blazing hot forge and a piece of gold thrust into it to be heated until all that is impure and ...

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s true character. All...

The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. When they were in a crucible moment, they suddenly had a greater ability to see their own nature. The everyda...

Our character is not merely the result of our choices, but rather the form our agency takes through our beliefs and intentions. So understood, the idea of agency helps us see that our character is not...

I found what I was looking for and purchased a paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The Idiot was published in 1868 and was Dostoevsky’s attempt to create a perfect soul in the character of Princ...

Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.

Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...

Most leaders focus on how to succeed in a task. A far better approach is to focus on who you are.

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me.

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson provides a wonderful analogy of what happens when we cultivate the virtues in our lives: W...

What are we hear for in the first place? The fundamental answer…is that we we’re “here for” is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made, and doing so in worship on ...

Current research indicates that personality traits are hardwired; they’re largely hereditary and remain relatively constant throughout our lives.1 If we’re outgoing or reserved, energetic or subdued, ...

God works through our waiting to strengthen our character through weakness, to develop our peace of mind by trusting him in chaos, and to teach us that we can glorify him just as much by waiting on hi...

Very often God’s will for you will be “I want you to decide,” because decision making is an indispensable part of character formation. God is primarily in the character-forming business, not the circu...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

​If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be o...

God of Love and Mercy—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: As those beloved by You...You give us the privilege of loving others and praying for them ... as we do today. We pray on behalf of those for whom th...

The English word “courage” is derived from the French coeur, which literally means “heart.” And since “heart” has traditionally (and metaphorically) been regarded as the seat of emotion, spirit, and s...

No short-cut that tries to bypass the patient unfolding of the true character of God, and our relationship to him as his children, can ever succeed in providing long-term spiritual therapy.

Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.

Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as i...

What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly, to be vulnerable.

In the battle of life, it is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better. The credit belongs to the person ...

How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns...

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.